I hate to break it to “prestige” authors, but I’m not sure how they’re going to make it in the digital marketplace. The “prestige” folks write tiny little books about tiny little subjects dear to the tiny little hearts of great big publishers. They don’t sell many copies, but the publishers get the prestige of having said-author’s name and work (usually excruciatingly liberal) on their imprint. You see these books in small numbers in prominent locations near the front of the bookstore. You don’t see many people picking them up.

As the big publishers go the way of the dinosaurs, what does it profit them to spend scarce resources on money-losing prestige works? Already, publishers are trying to justify their very existence, in a world where authors can go directly to their audiences, without the need for gatekeepers.

What the Internet has done to the news industry, ebooks are doing to publishing — which brings us to the winners in this brave new world.

84 Comments, 32 Threads

1.
Eva

It’s good news for readers too. I live in a small town where the local book store has closed and reopened several times and has closed again. Why? Because people generally go in once and don’t go back. Lots of those tiny books on tiny subjects that no one is interested in and most of the best selling author titles in the store were several years old. The publishing industry certainly doesn’t make it easy for small book sellers to do business. Because of e-publishing there’s no more driving to a bigger town, waiting for books via snail mail or having to put my name on the wait list at the local library.

Its bad news for people that like paper books. I have piles of books collected over the years. I also have lots of cds and floppies (!) with software on them that will never run again unless I begin an old computer museum to go with my old software.

That is, betcha in 10 years time i can still re read my Philip Dick stories and your kindle book has amazingly lost all its books and you have to pony up to replace them.

The people that like to sell and endless stream of gadgets and subscriptions to make them work are the winners.

You can turn an ebook into a physical book, and the technology has already been out there for a couple of years. (I remembered seeing a video of this “print on demand” machine before we moved, a big expo in Germany type thing, but couldn’t remember enough details to find it before now.)

I love a paperback and a glass of wine in the bath, myself, and I have trouble imagining a machine that will replace that sort of simple enjoyment– thankfully, it doesn’t HAVE to!

That is, betcha in 10 years time i can still re read my Philip Dick stories and your kindle book has amazingly lost all its books and you have to pony up to replace them.

Sorry, Mr. Luddite, you lose the bet. If an e-reader breaks, you can instantly download every e-book you bought to its replacement at no charge. That happened last year with my wife’s Nook.

Also, both the Kindle and Nook have PC apps that you can install, then download those same e-books, also at no charge. As an added bonus, the PC app synchs to the e-reader. So you can, for example, read the first 11 chapters of an e-book on your home PC, then fire up your Kindle on the road and in a few seconds be reading chapter 12.

Well, to which I would point out that Microsoft just discontinued its LIT format so everyone who has a book in lit format is screwed, if not now, then soon. While today it seems inconceivable that AMZ will ever not be there, the history of technology is replete with examples of the juggernaut dying.

And yet, I don’t disagree that the eBook is here to stay. I just think that customer WILL end up repurchasing some books and that the savvy heavy book consumer will continue to find ways to personally project their investment even if it sounds like piracy. To me it’s not. I spend hundreds of dollars on books, print and eBook, and I don’t expect any like consumer not to protect that investment. If it means stripping DRM and side-loading to the the new Reader of the day, so be it.

Paper books will survive. There are some formats (like heavy illustrated books) that don’t show up well on Kindles, tablets, etc.
But the brick and mortar books store is probably doomed. The surviving formats that need “dead tree” support are probably not enough to support them. You’ll have to order them on line, possibly from a print on demand publisher.

Me too. I lost more than 1000 books because humidity, fungus , coackroached , enviromentalists(thks to them most books are printed on acid base paper that autodestroy in 25 years)destroyed them.
In Alexandria there were supposedly 6 millions books. Only a handfull of them remains there( Thanks to the arabs invaders of Spain and the catholic church they are availabale today). There are millions of books tha i would like to read but i dont have the software to read them.They are written in icelandic, sweedish, german, russian, latin, greek, gaelic,old english.Some have been translated but the translation are to some language called english in the xix century. Others are more unfaithful than Bill Clinton,tradutore traditore(some rewrite or boelderize them).Or they dont want to transate them like the Jurgen´s book .Or are out of print because they can print a book that perhaps nomore than a dozen want to read: The book of settlement, the Adam Bede book refering the discovery of America ( written in the xiii century),The original not updated Corwin book on the Constituion, the John Adams book on the Constitution … and so on

So far what I’m finding is the hardest part, not counting the actual writing thing, is getting people to read and give feedback. Once I finish a novel or enough writings to put them together I have no fear for outlets, but to actually get people to look at my brain-spatter is… difficult.

The reduction of paper books is a shame, but its a natural reaction both to the unwillingness of publishers to risk on new people which forces the new authors to turn to e-books and ‘zines who have less overhead and more risk taking ability, and the rising costs of paper books. I’m willing to take a risk for a couple dollars, or even a few, but the prospect of spending 10 bucks on a paperback based on just the back cover blurb is not as exciting.

Libraries are still running, Ruhan. After years of buying books, mostly through book clubs specializing in topics I was interested in, such as “The Library of Science”, “The History Book Club”, “The Military Book Club”, and “The Science Fiction Book Club”, I rediscovered the local library.

Now I take pencil and paper with me when I visit a Barnes and Noble store and save the title and author of each book that looks interesting. Then I hit the library and take out or reserve those books. I do the same with books having interesting reviews in the Sunday paper or books I see mentioned on the internet. The only books I buy these days are the ones I MUST HAVE for my collection.

The library also has a service called “InterLibrary Loan”, which can borrow books on your behalf from libraries which have them. These are usually older books in limited demand. (The Wall Street Journal recently had a list of recommended books on economic topics discussing those books in a few hundred words. One was a 1923 biography of Mark Hanna, an industrialist and President McKinley’s campaign manager in 1896. ILL got me a copy of the book in about two weeks. My cost was $0.00!)

The library also has movies on DVD (they’ve mostly discontinued VHS cassettes) and books on CDRom. You can only check these items out for a week rather than the three weeks for books, but it’s still part of the standard free service.

The libraries in Colorado Springs and surrounding suburbs are part of the Pikes Peak Library District, and many of its services are online and available 24-7. You can see what items you have out and when they should be returned, what items you have on reserve, and you can search the “card” catalog for material you’re interested in. You can also go to the ILL’s world catalog to search for materials (mostly books, obviously) held by libraries all over the country. [I got one very interesting book from the early 1950s on coast artillery emplacements on Oahu sent from a library in Honolulu.]

Given these days of tight budgets for local governments, I fear I may soon have to pay directly for the library services I now get at taxpayer expense.

See, I’m an avid fiction reader, and as such I’m aware of Sturgeon’s Revelation: 90 per cent of everything is crap. This doesn’t change, regardless of the medium. Good stories have never been the only ones to get published; look at Twilight and Eragon, for god’s sake. Or don’t. I wish I hadn’t.

So, how does utter garbage like that get published? Same way anything else does; people spend money to make money. The best advertiser gets their book on the bestsellers’list regardless of actual content. The internet will not change that. All this means in that the author who can afford the best pop-ups will get the most readers.

The internet is wonderful for commerce, but it kills literary art. All of the advertising destroys the visual flow needed to communicate the appropriate thoughts and feelings, like so: http://tinyurl.com/43s4xrh

Advertising is the only way an author can make money online. If print is dead, then so is copyright. If copyright dies, the only way for literary artists to support themselves is outright begging, or courting the support of wealthy patrons. Creative writing is much more time-consuming than column writing. Compare H. L. Mencken to George R.R. Martin, and you’ll see who had to work harder.

I hadn’t bought a comic book in 30 years, until I noticed the Comic X app in the iPad App Store. Since then, I’ve bought a few dozen.

The idea that the internet kills art is merely an assertion — and one not supported by the facts. There’s been an explosion of content in new media.

Decrying “Twilight” is snobbery disguised as an argument. I don’t care for it, but millions of people do. They find the stories and characters compelling, or they wouldn’t spend money on it. Unlike Shakespeare, I don’t expect anyone to remember Twilight 500 years from now. But how many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries do we remember? Few, if any — and yet their works still sold plenty of theater tickets back in the day.

Epublishing and tablet computing are both quite quite young, but the changes have already been quite profound. And if I can use some bad writing here for just a moment, the changes are apt to become more profounderer.

As for your disapproving of the free marketplace of the internet, if it’s true that you like having things chosen for you, I hope you get over it before you’re much older. And if you ask me what I mean by “having things chosen for you” — for the last several years, publishers could decide how much each book would sell. NOT predict. DECIDE. Even imagining publishers are angels — they aren’t — forget all the good books that were never published — you have NO idea how many published books you never saw nor knew were published. For most writers, unless you got very, very lucky, getting published was sort of a cross between being mugged and being in an abusive marriage.

You’re too young to cling to nonsense like “the word from above.” You’re too young to worship at the altar of “litchratchure” too. I’m telling you right now (treat it as a revelation) that the world is much more interesting, strange and diverse than anyone in your school told you. Your professors are sad little people who live in a cocoon of their own opinions. (UNLESS you’re taught by Glenn Reynolds, of course.) They wouldn’t know immortal works if they bit them in the graduation credits. Open your eyes. Then open your eyes again. (Oh, and do yourself a favor. Put down the literary “master piece” and read Pratchett. Start with Wee Free Men and read the entire series. YES, I KNOW it’s “YA” — where else would you look for the important ideas?)

Go through all the posts, about a year back. See how they changed opinions. Study the field. Then come back and talk from a position of knowledge. Right now you sound twenty. (No, just because you ARE doesn’t mean you should. My son doesn’t.)

“— you have NO idea how many published books you never saw nor knew were published.”

An excellent example would be A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole – an unknown who penned that brilliant novel. It was published after his death by suicide – in part from the frustration of not being recognized as being print-worthy. Had it not been for the efforts of his mother and a fellow writer we would never have had this excellent novel for our reading pleasure.

I’m sure there are many fine novels and short stories that will never be published but at least some of them have a chance for exposure to the masses with the internet being so widely available. At least until the idiots in DC get their hands on the throttle of the web. I shudder at that thought – it is my main ‘in-touch’ with the world being in such an isolated area of Washington state.

I guess that’s why J. A. Konrath and John Locke and Amanda Hocking are making money hand over fist, because the internet have made it impossible for artists/author’s to make money.

Technology changes. No one freaked out when tapes, 8-tracks, VHS, ice boxes, walkmans, typewriters, radio shows, went obsolete. Not the way we are with books. True that some e-book formatting has room to improve.

When video came to homes movie theatres freaked out. No one would go to theatres and watch movies anymore. Instead it expanded the market share. People bought movies they saw on the big screen.

E-books are doing a similar thing. Cheaper books means more people can buy more books. With my $20 that used to buy one hardcover book, I can buy several 2.99 e-books and the author gets 70% of the cost of the book.

You realize we’re going to get hit by a vicious eldritch horror because of this, right? Have you ever seen the contents of the average publisher’s slush pile. Now that crap is going to end up in the Amazon and iTunes bookstores.

There are going to be people gouging their eyes out, in an attempt to wipe away the pain of what they’ve read.

OTOH, ask Ric Locke how much money you can make if you get Glenn to recommend your book on Amazon.

“Have you ever seen the contents of the average publisher’s slush pile?”

No, Greg, I haven’t. (Have you?) But I do happen to know that Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War” was rejected by eighteen publishers before St. Martin’s Press decided to take a chance on it. The book won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, was praised by Robert A. Heinlein (“may be the best future war story I’ve ever read!”), and is still in print 37 years later.

That’s not an isolated case. Most bestselling authors had their books rejected numerous times before a publisher accepted them. So I find your childlike faith in the wisdom of editors to be misplaced.

If you feel you need someone else to decide what you’re allowed to read, that’s your choice. But I don’t share that need. I would much rather decide for myself. And I find that reviews, recommendations, and word of mouth are much better ways to find books that I like than relying on the prognostication skills of an English major sitting in a New York office.

An otherwise decent comment thouroughly subverted (for me at least) by the besmirching of the word “editor” by confusing it with “publisher”. The difference between the two professions is profound, but that’s beyond the scope of a post. Suffice it to say that publishers can make or break books with their marketing decisions regardless of the works’ merits; a good editor ensures a writer’s voice, vision and message are worth reading.
It causes me little grief that “the publisher” may be going the way of the dinosaur, in that the role of an editor can never likewise be usurped by technology. Exhibit A: computer “spell-checking” has been a horrible development. Too many people don’t know the difference between *its* and *it’s*; or *who’s* and *whose*; or *there*, *their*, and *they’re*, but think they can write because spell-check gives them a thumbs up. A decent editor would fix any such mistake; a good one would fix it then mock you; a great one would fix it, punch you out, and never work for you again.

And, speaking as a voracious reader, I appreciate a good editor. There are far to many books out there for me to not judge a book by its cover. I remember this topic being debated in the pages of either Galaxy or Isaac Asimov SF magazine, and the conclusion was that there is money to be made online if you’re a good editor/reviewer.

Present day spell checkers are way better than that. The one that’s a component of any version Microsoft Word released in the last ten years, correctly distinguishes between “their”, “they’re”, and “there”. Hell, it’s sometimes difficult in MS Word to get the program to allow you to use the “incorrect” spelling when you intentionally want to use that spelling as an example of incorrect spelling.

Stephen, I have a feelling you’ll be getting a lot of that sentiment, which was around as soon as written language got going (doesn’t a Sumerian tablet bemoans the contemporary state of learning that “now everyone wants to write a book”?).

But in the spirit of futurism here’s how I see it —
1. the ones succeeding will be aggregators with good quality control (democratic or editorial). Pron has lead most publishing / media game changes and, similar to business models in that world, I see subscription services to such writing content hubs going up soon.
2. Creativer after market — illustrators, animators, etc. gotta be happening a lot faster to a good story too.

Jumping in on a couple of the discussions here, I think Bill Quick and a few of you all are overstating the situation.

- Yes, paper sales are falling, but 80% of book sales are still paper, not digital. Paper books will continue to be published, for many reasons.

- No, the death of paper sales does not kill copyright; digital rights management is a well-developed field that is still developing, legally and technically. You don’t think lawyers and engineers are going to leave an opportunity like that alone?

- Publishers abuse midlisters mostly through the extremely stingy royalty arrangements. This is where midlisters have the most to gain from digital publishing, where royalties are more generous, but midlisters are still better off going through mainstream publishers instead of tossing their stuff onto the internet raw.

- Yes, readers are better served by the gatekeeper system rather than this free-for-all offered by CreateSpace and Amazon and SmashWords and Lulu. You don’t like gatekeepers? Try a book market without them. The Night of the Living Slushpile. Millions of titles stalking around, and nothing but word of mouth on which is the Great American Novel and which is My fillosofy of the intire Unavers. Readers can find out through word of mouth, but writers cannot rely on word of mouth to sell their works unless they’re satisfied with spending a year crafting a story that is read by no more than a select group of friends.

- Writers are better served by gatekeepers. The author of Twilight had an editor. I didn’t see her original manuscript, but I’ve seen a few raw manuscripts that went on to become decent-selling books, and the difference that the editors made was night and day. Authors who want to skip agents and editors are deluding themselves.

- Yes, those damn little prestige books are annoying. They also make awful movies. But I don’t quite follow how digital publishing will relieve us of their existence. Elitists — literary, political, whatever — are self-propagating and I don’t see their power waning significantly any time soon.

Arhooley, there’s a counterargument here that’s almost conclusive: the incremental cost of printing a book is between 1 and 10 million times greater than delivering an ebook.

I expect that paper books will continue to be published. But when an ebook pays the author a buck and costs the buyer a buck six bits, while making the “publisher” more than a physical book, it’s gonna be a specialized market for a $30 hardcover.

I don’t know that writers or readers are best served by “gatekeepers,” ever read Larry Corriea’s Monster Hunter International? He self-published, self-marketed and proceeded to sell so many books a publisher finally had to take notice. The gatekeepers kept us from reading a guy who now has two NYT bestsellers under his belt for years.

Editing can be hired. I’m starting a little editing house precisely to fill that market niche. There are plenty of freelance graphic artists out there who would be happy to do your cover for $50-$200. So apparently we don’t need that service either. There’s at least one epublishing house I know of Naked Reader Press which is offering all those services and paying far better royalties than the Big 5. So explain to me again, how we’re all better served by paying $12.99 for an ebook it cost the publisher $0.005 to deliver?

What’s left? Marketing? The big houses don’t waste money on marketing mid-listers anyway so how are we the readers, or the authors served by that?

I would never have known about Sarah if she hadn’t spotted a piece on SF I wrote here and ambushed me with an offer of a free book in exchange for a review. I had missed out on not just a good friend but a great writer, because of the “gatekeepers.”

There are plenty of freelance graphic artists out there who would be happy to do your cover for $50-$200.

I certainly hope not; those were the starvation prices of 30+ years ago.

Oh, you can probably get some student fresh out of school to whack out something for that kind of money; people desperate for a published piece will do all kinds of things. Will it be good? Maybe—but not as good as it would be if you’d paid an experienced artist a legitimate rate, which runs somewhere between $2500 and $5000 depending on the type of book.

Fifty dollars for a book cover is a price that is below the wage paid for a McDonald’s drone, if you consider the time to come up with a halfway-decent concept and the time to execute it. Two hundred dollars begins to approach minimum wage—maybe—from the underside. You get what you pay for.

Pat speaking as one of the writers who doesn’t agree about gatekeepers (I believe in editing, proofreading, formatting, good covers. They’re worth paying for)I am afraid I can dig up a few traditionally published writers who really are terrified of losing the gatekeepers and would agree with Arhooley. Some are yesterday’s cool kids who had an in with the publisher and derived an advantage from that, and others are the younger/newer ones who just made it past the gatekeeper, and really need that stamp of approval, being very insecure, and really not wanting to have to have people wade through the hoi polloi to find them. Both sets are really scared by open competition.

You are right. Nobody is worst proofreader than the author.I have wrote five law books.And the worst part is to review the books after it have been formatted. I have to asistans to do it for me.I only see some mistakes when i use the books to prepare my classes once is a the printed book and you cant do nothing but mark it for the next edition.

Please, oh please. Tell me this was written as a joke. I demand that you do so!

Because if you are not joking then this is absolute proof that we have reached the end times and have begun to suffer the fate of Babylon.

You mean to tell me that you are a published law professor?!

Ok, I get it. You typed this comment after you blew 0.20 BAP at a checkpoint. And you did it with four broken fingers from the bar fight you were in earlier that evening. And! you typed it on a iPhone 2 with a damaged spell checking app that you downloaded for free.

Who appointed those wheat-from-chaff separators, and what makes them qualified more than you and me?

Who believes gatekeepers have their finger on public opinion? We almost lost John Grisham and Joanne Rowling to those ‘people of taste and discernment’. But for Grisham’s and Rowling’s tenacity, the public would have been barred from judging their talent.

I hated The Catcher in the Rye and I still do. If I had been the gatekeeper when Salinger submitted his disgusting piece of filth, that book would never have seen the light of day. Am I the public? Is my opinion synonymous with public opinion? Would it have been well for readers to have been deprived of judging that book solely because a certain editor called Richard Tremayne had pronounced a verdict and found the book unworthy?

I know about Sturgeon’s Law: 80% of everything is c**p and all that sort of thing. Still doesn’t make an argument for gatekeepers, because, with gatekeepers, that 80% is still 80%, but of a much smaller pie.

Let authors have the option of publishing without gatekeepers, for those cases where, like Grisham and Rowling, they have reason to think the editor’s judgement is wrong and the public is going to think differently.

Jumping in on a couple of the discussions here, I think Bill Quick and a few of you all are overstating the situation.

Perhpas you and Quick/Green/et al just have different time frames and rates of change in mind.

Publishers abuse midlisters mostly through the extremely stingy royalty arrangements. This is where midlisters have the most to gain from digital publishing, where royalties are more generous, but midlisters are still better off going through mainstream publishers instead of tossing their stuff onto the internet raw.

You missed the main point – midlisters are genearlly ignored by mainstream publishers and generally don’t have the option of going through them regardless of whether it’s good for them or not. Obviously, for an unknown writer, hooking up with a big publisher who will commit some (but probably not much) effort to advertising your book is an advantage. But, you won’t make much money off the deal because of the low royalty, so it’s really just a promotional opportunity. And since big publishing houses have limited advertising budgets for midlist authors (the bulk gets spent on the big names), your book only has a very limited window to get any traction, after which it’s off their radar. And once you have name recognition, you’re probably far better off doing your own marketing (by which I mean contracting out with marketing people you pick and trust).

Yes, readers are better served by the gatekeeper system rather than this free-for-all…You don’t like gatekeepers? Try a book market without them…Slushpile…Readers can find out through word of mouth, but writers cannot rely on word of mouth to sell their works unless they’re satisfied with spending a year crafting a story that is read by no more than a select group of friends.

a) you’re assuming the gatekeepers are actually doing a good job. How have book sales been doing the last few years? Keeping up with population growth and inflation? No? Hmmm, must be the author’s fault then for not getting quality stores to the Gatekeepers.

b) so it’s better for authors to spend a year crafting a story that’s is read by no more than a single editor at a publishing house?

Writers are better served by gatekeepers. The author of Twilight had an editor. I didn’t see her original manuscript, but I’ve seen a few raw manuscripts that went on to become decent-selling books, and the difference that the editors made was night and day. Authors who want to skip agents and editors are deluding themselves.

Editors, sure, but who says those editors have to work for publishing houses? Frankly, under budget pressure, the publishers are cutting down on their editorial services anyway. And agents? Usefull for maneuvering the existing publishing world no doubt, but the agents that are well-connected enough to be useful there are as hard to hook up with as the publishers. They’re just another branch of the Gatekeeper Guild.

In the new world, the agents that will be worth their fee will be more like business/project managers who will help authors manage the editors and marketing people they contract with (and perhaps even manage the sub-agents hired to negotiate things like movie rights).

Yes, those damn little prestige books are annoying. They also make awful movies. But I don’t quite follow how digital publishing will relieve us of their existence.

I don’t think Stephen was saying it would, rather he was saying those authors would lose their gravy train because traditional publishers will soon no longer be able to afford their own vanity projects.

Stephen King tried that, what? Someone help me. Thirteen? Fifteen? years ago? (I remember my kid was little.)
Let me put it this way, a year ago I was panicked my agent might drop me. Last month I dropped her. The places she could get me into were simply not worth it. Three years ago I recommended that all my newbies wait till someone publish them, because publishing themselves would destroy their chances at a career. Now I say ‘It might be best to publish yourself or go with a small press.” It’s a completely different world. And the “Big publishers” are shakier than you think. On all levels. Read Kris Rusch. Do. Bookstores won’t even stock most books anymore.

Also, what I hear from inside the houses, they’re selling more like 50% ebooks. Don’t forget the figures you have include picture books, cookbooks, textbooks and others that don’t encourage ebook format.

ALSO for midlisters like me, we ALREADY have to do all our own marketing. Publishing (traditional) is the only place where ALL advertising money goes to the product that will sell anyway. (The known quantity.) So… the difference isn’t great.

Regarding Stephen King, as Sarah asked, how long ago was that? But of course even today, there is an important consideration – going your own way without a publisher does require you to manage and organize a bunch of work that publishers have traditionally done (but are doing less of today as a cost-cutting measure), things like marketing and editing. Not all authors, perhaps even very few authors, are good at or comfortable managing that set of tasks.

Which is why I think the agent-as-business-manager is an interesting thought. Instead of shepherding your manuscript (and royalty checks) through the publishing industry maze, the neuvo agent would run the business side of your writing career – for those writers who choose not to do it themselves. Economies of scale would let a good agent manage such things for several writers, building up a team of editors, marketing folks, and legal staff. Over time, such agents will maybe even come to look a lot like publisher of long ago, but that’s a story for another day.

Hey, can I play, too? I posted on this very topic this week at ChicagoBoyz -http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/23926.html
The gates have been opened for indy writers for a few years, and there are some terrifically good books out there, by writers who lost patience with the “submit 295+ times before you eventually get a deal from a traditional publisher.” For my first novel – I held a fund-drive on my original blog, and raised the money from my readers to publish it through a POD house.
And by coincidence, the hardbound reissue edition of the Adelsverein Trilogy launches today!http://www.amazon.com/Adelsverein-Complete-Trilogy-Celia-Hayes/dp/0934955840/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_6
What I would really adore to get for this book, is a deal with a German publisher, to sell it in translation. I’d clean up from all the Karl May fans out there.

Better yet, there are already a LOT of systems in place to spread the word about good books– geeks have been doing it for well over the last decade with fan fiction. (Think of it as free, unauthorized ebook versions of those “Star Wars” novels at the store, for those who aren’t familiar with fan fic.)

A decent number of the current official novel writers for Star Trek got started as fan fiction writers. I still remember the excitement when Una McCormack got hired to write a REAL, AUTHORIZED BOOK!

Fan fiction has a system in place to replace editors– by getting “proof-readers,” who are…well… editors. And folks who read stuff give feedback.

I suspect that, as ebooks get more profitable, editors-for-hire will become more popular.

Please notice that Amazon and Kindle have royalty rates of 30% to 70%. Which means for $3, the author is making as much as if the book were $25. I can justify a $3 impulse, while I have to wait until Christmas or birthday time for a $25 book.

And, barking nonsense on the gatekeeper function. People get excited and talk about good books. If a book has a website, or a fan club, that fan club is going to talk about other books, as well. I have a list of ten complicated novels- including the Norton Critical Edition of some of them- and James Herriot- and Diana Gabaldon- and two books of critical art essays- from a fan-girl website, that I’m going to buy hardbound- and I’ll have people to talk to, about these books. I’m about to tell them about my favorite out- of- print books, too, and I do expect that I’ll have some way to share the love and glee and chat. I’ll be reading more challenging work, in more detail, than from college.

And, golly, hand to hand worked for bands. The Smashing Pumpkins had ten years of touring before they were an overnight sensation. Glamour magazine has an article from the eighties, about the unglamorous life of a concert promoter: the poor guy was trying to book the Smashing Pumpkins into high schools. It was hard. They had a weird name. He was depressed.

Chris LeDoux– crazy famous in the rodeo circuit, unknown outside of it before Garth Brooks mentioned “a worn-out tape of Chris LeDoux” in one of his songs. Beautiful country-western singer– I’d say far better than GB.

“And, barking nonsense on the gatekeeper function. People get excited and talk about good books.”

Amen to that. The function of a gatekeeper is to decide why I SHOULDN’T read a particular book. To hell with that. I want people to tell me why I SHOULD read it. Theoretically, publishers do that by marketing, but as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, they reserve most of their marketing budget for books that don’t need it, because the author’s name on the cover is enough to ensure bestseller status. To hell with that too.

The people who ARE doing a good job of telling me what books I should read, and why, are the bloggers and fan sites and Amazon reviewers and book clubs. And they don’t charge any money for it, which means more money for the author. Why should I pay three times as much for a book so that most of that money can be skimmed off by the publisher and paid to their staff for performing a gatekeeper function that I DON’T want and that they are doing a LOUSY job of?

Sorry, but the legacy publishing industry DESERVES to die. It doesn’t serve the interests of the authors OR the readers at all well. And now we have alternatives.

I’m excited that authors have more access to an audience through electronic publishing. There’s one thing that disturbs me though. I think most writing benefits greatly from aggressive editing and good proofreading. How do you address this?

You say that as if traditional publishing has done a great job of ensuring quality. While I have to admit that most printed books have at least very good spelling and grammar, I have at least three paper books – two hardcover and one paperback – that have several major mistakes in them. And I mean really glaring errors that jumped right out at me. I found them so disappointing that I actually made a list of the errors in one case.

All of these books were published within the last 15 years. This makes me suspect that the quality of editing is going down just as the quality of spelling and grammar in general is going down.

I know the (middle-rankng) author of one of the three books I’ve mentioned slightly and expressed my disappointment at the number of mistakes in the published hardcover version of the book. I actually cited the errors – we corresponded via email – and he didn’t deny any of them; they were self-evident. He assured me that his publisher used a proofreader and a copy editor and that his editor, who has a PhD. was widely regarded as “the best in the business”. But, he said, mistakes still slip through the cracks….

He assured me that he would try to get the errors I’d mentioned, only some of which had been pointed out to him previously, fixed in future editions of the book.

It continues to baffle me how an ordinary guy like me was able to find errors that well-established professional writers, proofreaders, copy editors and editors in a major publishing house failed to find.

I look back at books from 20-30 years ago, pre-desktop publishing, and there were far fewer errors than there are now, which is a bit counterintuitive. My opinion? With spell check editors have become lazy.

I agree with your comment on today’s poor proof reading by publishers.

Dennis Showalter, a professor at Colorado College, wrote “Patton And Rommel: Men of War in the Twentieth Century.” A New York publisher, Berkley Trade, published this book in 2005. I believe BT can be considered a major publisher, as it reportedly publishes over 600 books a year and is a subsidiary of the Penguin Group.

While I enjoyed the book, I found its egregious grammar and spelling errors distracting. There seemed to be spelling errors on almost every page. Perhaps the most flagrant was that Rommel, whose name appeared on almost every page, on one page was spelled “Romml!”

I had to wonder how Showalter submitted his text and photos to Berkley. I expected he simply would have emailed the text in MS Word files for each chapter. As an experiment, I typed in the paragraph with “Romml” in MS Word 2010, and Word suggested I meant to type “Rommel.”

I emailed both Berkley Trade and Penguin Group offering to proof read that Showalter book for a free copy of its corrected 2d edition and suggesting that, if they liked the results of that exercise, that we could discuss me working from home on a paid basis. They never responded.

I ended up skimming through the last half of the comments, so this might have already been covered.

I would be more worried about the decline of reading and not of books, whether they be paper or electronic. With the instant gratification culture that we are creating, I can’t see children being born 10 to 20 years from now, turning into young adults that would care to sit down with a book nor kindle for a good read.

I can only look at my own situation and know that as a child I enjoyed reading and went to the school library often to get a book to pass time between classes. Now as an, almost 40 year old, adult, I could care less for reading a book (the wife would sadly agree with this, since I won’t read her novel), since I get more satisfaction from reading blog articles and the witty comments posted below.

In retrospect, maybe I should have picked out books that would have taken me longer to read, in order that I destroy my own attention span for reading.

First, while young people do seem to be showing a declining interest in reading books written on paper, I don’t think they’ve actually stopped reading. In fact, I’m not even sure whether they are reading fewer paper books given that I don’t have any kids and don’t work in a library or bookstore. But they are most assuredly still reading and writing to some extent; just look at all the texting they do. Now, admittedly, the quality of the writing/spelling/grammar in the texts I’ve seen are horrible, they do seem to be comprehensible to the people sending and receiving the texts.

Second, there are some simple and brilliant ways to encourage kids to read. Spider Robinson spelled it all out in an essay entitled The Seduction of the Ignorant and gives two field-tested methods of getting kids to read that don’t involve depending on schools or other institutions. I can’t recommend this essay highly enough. In fact, I just wrote to him to suggest that he make it available free at his website. In the meantime, you can find this essay – which is just 4 paperback pages long – in his short story collection User Friendly.

Hank,
I can’t believe you just compared reading novels to texting. That basically proves my point of the decline of readers among the youth. And to follow up with a comment about how to easily encourage those not interested in reading, doesn’t really embolden your argument.

The only thing I can see turning the tide for readers would be an explosion of home schooling and an implosion of television watching.

I’m a book lover and I own hundreds, have purchased thousands, and I own a Kindle.

There are some books that are better on paper, but most fiction is not in that category. I’m paying for content, not dead trees. The other great thing about the Kindle is that all the old classics are available, for free.

The future of publishing is going to be publicity, editing, proofreading, and cover art. The printers are going to mostly fade away. The gatekeepers will be bypassed. The smart publishing houses will survive by helping find what I want to read.

Imagine a world where you could buy a book for $3. The author gets $1 – way more than he gets today. A publisher has reputable reviewers who recommend titles (Amazon gets folks to do this for free), provides editing, proofreading, cover art and distribution for the other $2.

I would use my library less, because $3 is cheap enough that it is hardly worth driving to the library to browse. I’d put all my favorite authors on a “buy all their new books” list.

Oh, how I’ve ENJOYED this blog, your link to Ms Hoyt and HER wonderful article comparing the author in the author/traditional publisher relationship to a beaten wife!

My experience in self-publishing goes back to the 80s. By any business model critique my efforts have hardly been financially successful. BUT the enjoyment I’ve had! People I’ve met. It’s been life-enhancing for me.

I came at it from opposite to you-all novelists. I get hooked on research in “tiny-niche” topics not writing tiny novels. Travel bibliography for one, sociable bridge (as opposed to serious bridge playing) for another. Is it quirky to enjoy hanging out at libraries and producing a couple books on topics no one else thought to do up to that time? Absolutely, but it’s just as addictive for me as writing your sci-fi novels for you.

I DID get a contract from a prestigious reference book publisher and did two updated editions of Traveler’s Reading Guide for them. BUT took all the fun out of it! Or I should say it took all the pleasure in the process out of it, having a publisher/boss, their deadlines, etc.

When I finally decided to end my library browsing and actually write Bridge Table or What’s Trump Anyway, I KNEW one thing–I’d never go to a traditional book publisher up front with a book proposal. I would publish it myself for the satisfaction of getting my mountain of notes and sources and outlines into print before I died, have a website, learn about internet marketing–and if that leads to a contract offer, o.k.,if not, o.k. too.

My advice then to those considering the self-publishing route is — GO FOR IT. Nothing other than my family, has given me more psychological/emotional satisfaction than producing my books and knowing that I filled that tiny un-filled niche in bookdom.

But, WHILE you’re writing the book also learn the skills you need for internet marketing. Or buy the skills needed if you can afford to do that. Don’t wait until the book is done (as I did), or wait until you’re as old as I am! Get over your resistance (I never fully have) to marketing and the internet process. You must feel easy with, enjoy it, if your priority is making money.

Anyway, if you do seek a traditional publisher they’re going to insist you do most of the marketing, have a website, et cetera–might as well be your own boss, no publisher to beat up on you.

What I can see emerging is a small group of authors hiring a virtual assistant to set up websites, who does know internet marketing, to act as backup/instructor for the group. Too expensive perhaps for one author, affordable for say 5-6? As an alternative to “buying” each skill needed by the individual author.

It is not either or. A lot of us are pursuing both traditional publishing and putting some work out ourselves. There’s also the matter of time. I still recommend writers send their work around to agents, then publishers, but it takes a year or more to make the rounds and even then you have to poke them once in awhile for a response because they’re overwhelmed.

Cutbacks means most books do not get the editorial time they deserve. Writers need to do that themselves and there are enormously talented freelancers. I’ve received kudos on my writing from senior editors as well as Hollywood producers so I know it’s a matter of time.

That said, I have the e-rights to my first novel and am putting it out myself via Smashwords. That resulted in a German epublisher contacting me so it’s available in Europe as well. Look for my novel DEAD WEIGHT, a scuba diving adventure, on Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, etc. in about two weeks. Thanks!

Those vile morons wasted 20 years of my life. Now I publish on my own and I’m about to put out my 6th book. Kids consistantly tell me that my books are equal to or better than “H*rry P*tter.” (“Equal to” irritates me, but I’ll take it.) And these are books that no one had the brains to publish for over two decades.

Publishers need to be cut out of the equation starting yesterday. It’s time to stop giving decisive power in the art of storytelling to failed writers – and that’s what the clown is who opens the envelope and decides if your manuscript moves forward.

I’m not a prestige author. After a lifetime in publishing, I wouldn’t even call myself midlist because legacy publishing has ignored me so hard for so long.
I sold over 10,000 copies of my novel this spring on Amazon alone and had interest from a film producer. I was #2 behind a book that was a hit movie at that time. All without the “help” of an agent or a dead tree publisher, all of whom hated this book.
My children’s books long out of print and out of step with the times, as I am, I was assured by these elites in NYC, are among my strongest selling titles. Kids love them. They want me to turn them into a series.
Legacy publishing is over. It’s done. I’m not crying about it.

The same for all the rest of you. If I’m going to look at books, graphic novels and screen-plays from authors unknown to me (even very successful ones) I would prefer to buy from Pajamas Media fans and contributors. Point me to your work!

And while we are at it, some one please turn Fredrick Douglas’ life into a screen play so we can start raising money for the film.

I just finished “The Help”. I don’t understand how it was ever published in the first place, let alone become a best-seller. It’s very poorly written and constructed, it’s maudlin and one-sided, and it doesn’t speak to today’s world at all. I have to think that it was bought and supported and pushed by a (liberal) publishing world, publicized by a (liberal) media, and then purchased and made into a movie by a (liberal) Hollywood.

I usually like best-seller anythings — movies, books, restaurants. If they’re popular with everyone else, I’ll probably like them too. Or that’s been the case in the past. I couldn’t get through the Academy-Award winning “Hurt Locker” movie, so I don’t trust movie critics any more and haven’t watched progressive-leaning movies for years despite their glowing reviews. Now I know that just because a book is on the best-seller list does NOT mean that it’s either well-written or has an interesting story to tell.

Well, look at it this way: most of the new jobs are lower-paying, right? But the job-holder has a parent who has higher pay. Or, say, me, a stay at home mother. My husband enjoys buying tech things. I have a smaller discretionary budget. I just spent three hours at the dentist, waiting on someone else’s procedure. I have five more visits like that in the next four months, then we go to braces. He has $150 to buy me a small, shiny gadget. I have $20/ week mad money- sometimes more, sometimes less- there are three small kids at home- that $20 has to cover for them, too. So I have, really $3, maybe $4 dollars. I can sit there and read magazines, or I could flip open a gadget, and get swept away. The twenty-something year old at a nearly minimum wage job- has that gadget, too, from her parent. $25 is 4 hours of work, maybe five, with taxes and fees and so on. That four hours might be the lunch budget for the week, as well, for that person. I know I can calculate the price of lunches brought in by hourly workers- 25 cent ramen, 35 cent apple, 70 bologna sandwich, $2 frozen meal- versus the $6- $8 lunch bought by a manager-type. A store has half a dozen hourly workers for each manager.

I can imagine something like radio before clear channel: regional favorites, authors making a living in their region, setting stories in their region, with their rabid fans. The best of these could go national. Like, say, the Seattle music scene, in the early nineties. It took a lot of late nights to perfect grunge. Some went national. Others still have weird little fan clubs.

There’s one writer I adore, who is heinous about descriptions, but I lived a block from where the story was set. I didn’t have to imagine- I could walk around in the morning, and see what she was struggling to describe. Then, I could concentrate on her strong points- a marvelous sense of humor and an over-the-top plot. She’ll never be big, nationally. But she’s perfect right here.

Or, say, the wild music fan. I have four books by one- who says he’s likely never to get into print again- who wrote the funniest books in his genre. I have met people and mentioned this book- and they are one Kevin Bacon from some of his other rabid fans. Which confirms me as a fabulous, cool person. It’s like the vinyl record collectors sharing their milk-crates of splendor. It’s the same thing.

And, really, even print authors need web-pages or blogs or something. There are twenty different chick lit books on the browsing table at B&N. I don’t have 40 minutes to do the flip and check. I can recognize one author b/c she has a blog, and it’s like grabbing a safety ring. Another author, it’s the cover. another author, b/c someone on a website has said something about her. or I’ve read an interesting essay by the author. Past that—that’s ten minutes, I’m tired and I want a cup of coffee and a bagel, and to sit down and read the book that passed the flip test. The unvarnished author voice, in an informal blog, or an essay- I’m willing to ride along on the boardgame of a novel, b/c of that voice.

And, honestly, at this point I don’t trust editors or critics or even the tastemaker at the bookstore. I trust my friends, and fan-girl reading sites. Even Twilight, that benchmark of an unknown writer- would not have been picked up- except she had a brand-new editor who knew the written guidelines, but not the “rules.” Three entire generations of editors from women’s colleges have been brainwashed to only allow femininist heroines stomping zombies and having ambiguous, uncommitted sex with maybe boyfriends. I’ve even read a “mommy book” where the whole story was about how boring and pointless a stay at home life is. It’s my life. I paid money to get insulted, ignored, looked down on? Or, bought the advertisement for the therapeutic affair? Really?

There are a lot of voices that need to be set free from the need to succeed nationally, in three months flat, which is the usual rotation at B&N.

And, goodness, if you write, keep writing. I’ll go to the library, and count how many books are in a series, before even trying to open the book. If I like visiting the characters- I want a long, meandering visit over several books. Book one- who cares? Book two- eh, book three- I’m willing to try, book four, I’ll try several times. I want to like a long series with good characters. It’s easier than being creeped out by the not- as-good writer.

I’ve been fighting with pubishers for over half of my life now. I’ve self published printed books because publishers are idiots – plain ‘n’ simple. My wife and I have spent money that should have gone for home repairs or vacations. We’ve gone into debt to get ourselves more inventory. There have been rewards both artistic and emotional, but little in the way of monetary. We did it because we believed in what we were doing. I’ve been saying for years that no one should be able to own or control your intellectual property. But everyone’s been all “It’s hard to make your own books!” “I don’t know what to do!” They wanted a publisher to be the rich daddy to do all the work, and they were willing to sell their souls.

Now comes e-publishing and NOW everyone’s saying, “stick it to the man!” NOW everyone’s saying, “Hey! A publisher shouldn’t own someone else’s work!”

I’m not impressed. You’re all a bit late to the fight.

You’re like people who wait for the railroad to be be built, then move out west and call yourself a pioneer.

Epublishing has somehow made it easier to write a popular novel? Run that one by me again, please, because apparently I missed something.

All epublishing does is remove a barrier-to-entry, and (to an amazing degree) reduce the costs of publishing. What it does not do is make anyone more salable. The Internet made blogging possible — made my career possible. But without some native talent, a willingness to learn, and a shitload of hard work, no one would be paying me for my efforts. Did I take something away from the failed columnist or the minimum wage disc jockey? Am I a coward for having helped, in some small way, to help blaze the trail in two new media?

I’m sorry your own efforts haven’t been more fruitful. Perhaps some day they will be — I would certainly hope so. But you have derided a generation of struggling writers simply for taking advantage of a new medium. Snap out of it, please — life’s too short for bitterness and envy.

One more thing, and I hope I’m not being cruel here. But you didn’t lay any railroad tracks. Amazon did that on the hardware and delivery side — with lesser efforts from Apple, B&N and Sony. And a very few forward-thinking publishers such as Baen have done good work on the business-model side.

And self-epublishing authors are doing the track-laying on the content side.

I’m not deriding people for taking advantage of a new medium. I’m deriding them for not having the guts to publish when it was just a world of printed matter.

I’ve been dealing with this for years. And when my inventory runs out, I have to have the ready cash to boost it again, or the willingness to go into debt.

Bitter? You’re damned right! I got shafted by the publishing industry, and I got shafted hard. I ran into the evilest, most controlling people this side of Josef Fritzl. And I constantly ran into authors who wouldn’t sacrifice their own finances to print their own books. They just kept shrugging and saying, “Well, we can’t do it without publishers.” They were all lazy, afraid, or knew damned well that their work wasn’t worth the sacrifice.

So where it used to cost me about $3,500 to print a run of 1,000 books, now it’s a world where it’s post online and the inventory never runs out.

Now they’re going to “stick it to the man”? Puh-leez! I stand by my statement: Where was all this feisty independence when it was print and paper?

As a writer, ttp://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2627297/posts, I can tell you that getting stories together and ready for print or the ebooks is a tremendous chore. I have three books of stories like the one above and sometimes I wish I could just pay someone to do all the detail work.

The big publishers had a cartel. By acting as the gatekeepers they controlled the supply of books to meet the demand as they deemed fit in their view, and only the writers with the right allegiances were allowed into bookstores. The gate is still up, but the fence to the bookstore disappeared; not the physical bookstore but the virtual one. Who needs gatekeepers if there are no fences? After all what is a book, but information, and information can be disseminated virtually, in a virtual store.

One aspect of e-publishing that helps me is the way technical books are now available online or in electronic versions. These technical references will be irrelevant in three years, so electronic copies last just as long as I need.

They are greatly discounted because there are reduced production costs, I can read them on the same platform where I work, and I can search them rapidly.

The increased population of available writers and the ease of delivery of titles, even by unknowns writing on topics with a minuscule audience, has promoted an information blizzard; and I’m glad of it.

Where once there were only one or two references on some technical topics, there are now often dozens. The problem now is one of making the agonizing choice. But with these reduced costs I can afford to own two or three of these electronic tomes, as compared to the prices of their tree-pulp ancestors of just a few years ago.

And a hearty “thanks” for whoever invented the electron. It’s been a huge success around here.

I enjoyed this piece (but then I always enjoy Mr. Green!), and in looking over the comments above, I think the main point of the essay is that ebooks are changing the industry. They’re certainly making my own publishing easier. I’d point out that when Stephen wrote ” . . . the next Clancy or Grisham will always come around,” he may not have known that Clancy’s first book was self-published. A big publisher took it up and the rest is history. That, however, is a rare thing indeed.

Please, have you ever met a “sticking it to the man” writer? Honestly, the only self- published person I ever met had a trust fund. I don’t have a trust fund. I don’t even have $3,500 lying around, for a book to be self- published.

Snips about vacations and so on, are just mean. If you haven’t noticed, most people in their twenties and thirties, with kids- are visiting relatives, if they are going anywhere. None of the kids in any of my three kids school classes have done anything but a drive to a park, in the last three years. NONE. The one person I know who’s been to Disney, did it as a charitable offering, for her sick child.

Even then, there’s that whole tricky matter of distribution. Amazon and Kindle and Smashwords and Kobo have made it very possible for talented writers to get a crack at an audience. Blogs, youtube, facebook and myspace and bulletin boards, and fan-site bulletin boards have made the cost of advertising effectively really low. You were doing desert farming. It’s really hard- even Dean Wesley Smith, who so generously tutors writers on how to do e-books- had to fold his publishing company. Nobody is slagging you for having a hard time of it.

Right now, however, this is a rejoicing- times have changed. Think about how much life changed when Gutenberg turned books into matters of weeks, and months, rather than a lifetime of painstaking copying.

I really do hope you use the skills you have so costly earned, to make a good living in this new form of publishing.

Most published stories don’t meet my expectations for a good read. This is as true of non-fiction as fiction. The gatekeeper system has not done a good job of ensuring quality. While it has kept out some really bad stuff, it has also kept a lot of good stuff out. This is nothing new. It has been true since Gutenberg opened the pandora’s box of information overload.

I am looking forward to this brave new world. More bad stuff, but more good stuff too, and readers will become the new gatekeepers.